Design Anthology - Asia Pacific Edition
Urban Decay, Thailand
Relics of rich cinema history, and their striking architectural typologies, are immortalised in a photography book by Philip Jablon
In the popular imagination, Thailand is a spectral land where ghosts coexist with the living. This holds true architecturally as well as spiritually: the country's urban and periurban areas are peppered with structures that are neither fully present nor entirely absent, haunted by the past and unable to reconcile with the future.
The most famous of these abandoned buildings, Bangkok's Ghost Tower — a half-built skyscraper thwarted by the 1997 Asian financial crisis — has never truly lived. However, the very opposite is true of the palatial Art Deco and severe mid-century structures that fill the pages of Thailand ’s Movie Theatres: Relics, Ruins and the Romance of Escape. ‘In the days before most houses had electricity, the local movie theatre was where everybody came together, irrespective of class or occupation,' writes its author Philip Jablon of the heyday of this fast-disappearing typology.
An American sustainable development researcher, Jablon was first drawn to the Kingdom's stand-alone cinemas in late 2007, after a brief encounter with the ‘paint-chipped modernist facade' of Chiang Mai's Tipanet theatre piqued his interest. In the years since, he's devoted his life to documenting them, not because he wants to relive the past (he grew up frequenting Philadelphia's cinemas, not Thailand's) but because he relishes the nomadic research process and feels a sense of solidarity with their fate. ‘In the back of my mind were memories of the lost movie theatres of my youth,' he writes of the book's genesis.
Like the cinema ushers of old, this elegiac coffee table book shines a torch into the darkness, illuminating those movie theatres that were — when Jablon encountered them, at least — still intact. Since he visited, a number have met ‘the wrecking ball of progress', while others have succumbed to the vicissitudes of consumer taste and digital technology, teetering uncertainly between glorious life and a squalid death.
Turning the pages, a picture emerges: of a mongrel modernism, typified by brutish facades and bold dimensional signage, evolving in what Jablon calls ‘a closed circuit'. Offering a welcome counterpoint to all the rot-stained ruins and crumbling marquees, meanwhile, are more upbeat chapters in which the author gives a human face to what was once a rich leisure industry ecosystem. We meet rugged film projectionists, the poster painters who turned movie marketing into a head-turning art form, and the sound dubbers who, on account of their skilled voicing of multiple characters and giving imported storylines a Thai flavour, were often a bigger draw than the movie stars themselves.
A sobering epilogue also offers a glimmer of hope. A conservationist call-to-arms as well as a heartfelt eulogy to what's been lost (only three stand-alone cinemas are still active, we're informed), Thailand ’s Movie Theatres singles out the planned conversion of the hoariest relic in Bangkok's faded movie-going past, the wooden Sala Chalerm Thani, as an example of what can be achieved when sensitivity to the country's shared cultural heritage triumphs over unsentimental market forces.
Jablon dares to dream, in other words, that other ghosts might yet be saved from purgatory, that their dust-caked foyers and desiccated auditoriums will one day reassemble and come alive again — if not exactly like before, then in a similar spirit.